


tipping the scales of life

by marshmallownose



Category: House of Anubis
Genre: AU, Angst, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, One Shot Collection, What-If, Your fave will die, this is gonna be a sad one, unrelated one-shots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28553814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marshmallownose/pseuds/marshmallownose
Summary: The residents of Anubis House have cheated death on numerous occasions, but this time they aren’t so lucky.-or-Taking moments where characters almost died but didn’t, and changing the narrative (all one-shots unrelated)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	tipping the scales of life

**Author's Note:**

> None of these will be happy lol not sorry.
> 
> We start with: What if Joy did actually die when Nina/Senkhara hit her with the bolt in the S2 finale?

What’s most surprising about it is that it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as she’d thought it would.

When Joy rushed at Fabian and pushed him out of the way, she’d expected the bolt to cut through her like a knife, or maybe burn like a white-hot flame directly through her chest and out the other side.

It’s not like any of those things. It’s more like in P.E. when the really extra athletic kids that she and Patricia always made fun of would throw a rubber ball, and it would strike right in the middle of her abdomen, knocking the wind out of her.

Yeah, that’s it.

She’s aware of her muscles going numb and maybe it’s a second or an hour before it happens, but Joy suddenly can’t stand upright anymore and she crumples like paper onto the floor of the library. The fall should hurt, but it doesn’t.

Maybe it’s better this way, almost poetic. She knows it’s not Nina’s fault—knows all of it isn’t Nina’s fault. They are both victims of circumstance, and now they both might die here tonight in the Frobisher Library. It’s silly, but she’s never felt more connected to the Chosen One than she has in this moment. She wants to apologize, but no words come to mind. Even if they did, she can not make her tongue work.

She can’t move, can’t feel anything. The numbing reaches her face and she can’t keep her eyes open anymore, the color leeching from her vision until she has to close them. Joy doesn’t want to shut her eyes, though, she wants to keep looking at Fabian, the boy she did this for in the first place. But she can’t lift her eyelids and resigns herself to the fact that his face is the last she’ll ever see, and really there were worse things that last image could have been.

It’s getting hard to hear now, but she can still make out Patricia and Amber screaming her name, can still hear Fabian pleading with her to hold on, but she can’t feel their hands on her skin, can’t move, can’t breathe.

Joy knows she should be afraid, but everything has numbed over so much she just can’t bring anything to the surface.

It was getting hard to remember now. What had she been doing? What were those sounds? What was her name? She doesn’t know and she can’t remember, so she lets the thought slip away like most on a silent lake. The surface was just as still as the depths, a cold, grey, glassy lake with nothing swimming beneath it, no ripples or current to speak of.

The darkness is getting darker and the strange sounds fade into silence, and then she’s floating in the blackness until the blackness, too, grows too dark even for that tantalizing speck of gold so far above her that never quite reaches her cold lips.

There are no more thoughts, no more sounds, no more darkness. There’s nothing.

And nothing anyone can do.


End file.
